Tag: web development

Today’s Project: Input Form Wave

Carl Setzer

In today’s project, I created some animated text for a faux login form. I really enjoy the effect of this one when you click on the input fields.

Though I am really tired (it’s been a long few weeks), I’m pleased that I was able to fit this project into my evening. I really want to become a better coder, and coding is the only way to get there.

I want to fit in some review of project management and systems analysis. I’m quite confident that these will be important parts of my career’s next steps.

Finished another code project

Carl Setzer

Today I completed the “Split Landing Page” project from my 50 Projects in 50 Days Udemy class. This one was pretty fun (yes, I’m a nerd).

Built a (mostly) CSS based animation effect onto the webpage. When you hover over half a page, it expands out to 75% of the page.

Check it out here. And you can check out all my web dev work on my developer page.

Day 7 of 50 Projects In 50 Days

Carl Setzer
Scroll Animation

So, I’ve not been great at perfectly sequential days (my current project has expanded out a bit), but I’m still at it.

Today’s project, “Scroll Animation“, is another simple project where we take some boxes of content and fly them in from the side. To add a bit more complexity, we have some coming from the left, and some from the right.

Another fun one. Check out my other work on this course here. Also, check out my developer site.

Update on 50 projects in 50 days

Carl Setzer
data codes through eyeglasses

So, I took the past couple of days off. I was exhausted after work Thursday, then had long work days Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So, I did two today! Fortunately, they weren’t too complicated. That brings me to day 5.

Today’s first project is titled “Hidden Search Widget“. A very simple project, where we make a search box that expands or contacts (no search functionality yet).

My second project today is “Blurry Loading“, where an image loads blurry, and comes into focus while a countdown timer counts.

Fun projects which are helping refine my HTML, CSS and JavaScript knowledge. I am working towards bettering my coding skills. Slowly but surely growing. Check out my developer site for more details.

50 Projects in 50 Days: Day 3

Carl Setzer5 Comments

Completed day 3 of the 50Projects in 50Days course, “rotating navigation”. This one rotates the whole page if you click on the hamburger icon in the upper left. Hard to imagine a use case, but it’s really fun.

I’ve been posting these to my recently re-done Github site. Again, I’ve done three of these:

With Expanding Cards, when you click on individual cards, they expand out, and the other ones shrink. For Process Steps, it’s like a progress indicator. Each time you press the “next” button, the line advances one over. And for Rotating Navigation, when you click on the hamburger icon, the web page rotates, showing the navigation buttons. For me, this is fun stuff. Which is good since it’s now 9:30 at night and I still haven’t eaten dinner yet.

Anyway, it feels good to refresh my knowledge and build out these skills. I feel it’s a critical part of my march into a tech career. Plus, the internet and web development are the future of tech. I intend to do one project per day every day, but we’ll see. I have a few things coming up that may cause a day or two to be lost. But I should have not problem keeping this moving forward.

Wish me luck!

Winter Quarter Recap

Carl Setzer
crop female freelancer using laptop at table at home

As spring break is nearly done, I thought this would be a good time to recap my prior quarter. It was interesting and challenging.

Courses

My class load consisted of:

Career Planning

Career planning was mostly about creating resumes and completing >=1 MTA exam. I did Windows Operating Systems Fundamentals. I wanted to do a couple, but my workload was so full that I couldn’t fit another one one in. Of course, Microsoft is retiring the MTA certs in June of this year, so I won’t be renewing it.

CSS

Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets was fun, and core to my studies. Hindsight being 20:20, I think it would’ve been better to take that before JavaScript. So, if you’re thinking of pursuing the same program, I highly recommend taking HTML first, then CSS, then JavaScript. HIGHLY recommend that order!

Anyway, it’s amazing what can be done with CSS. Besides simply configuring colors and fonts, the ability to create vector graphics within CSS blows my mind. This course covered a lot, and I still have so much more I want to learn.

Cisco Networking II

Lastly, Cisco Networking II. I survived the class fine. Ok, I more than survived, but I didn’t do as well as I would’ve like. The causality? A tactical miscalculation. I took the first quarter (CIS 171) LAST fall. Not as in fall of 2021, but, rather, fall of 2020. So, over a year between I & II. DO NOT DO THIS! I forgot so much. Also Cisco, bless them, added stuff to quarter 1. I had to do a TON of re-learning and, well, new learning. Fortunately, I have the internet and great Google skills. Also, I have a an amazing group of fellow students. And this course is in-addition-to my main coursework, which helped me keep things in check. The main lesson: if I decide to I want to get my CCNA certification, I need to review. It won’t truly be learning from scratch. I just need to refresh things like subnetting. But that’s in the nebulous future. So, we’ll see….

All-in-all, a fine quarter. I had to work hard, and take a mind-boggling number of notes. But it worked out well in the end. Now I start the last quarter towards this ATA program. And, more specifically, my last required class. But that’s another post.

Almost Done

Carl Setzer5 Comments
text on shelf

This next quarter is the last one before I finish my degree in Web Application and Cloud Development. Additionally, I only need one class to finish. Currently, I’m enrolled for another full-time quarter, but I am not sure that will materialize. I’ve had several recruiters reach out to me, and I’ve actually had a few interviews. At this point, I expect I’ll end up taking the one required class (which can be done fully online) and working full/part-time.

My interviews have excited me, and I really like the people I’ve met with. This feels like the best time to get back into the workforce. It’s exciting, and a bit scary. But it mostly feels fun.

Really, the next week will be crucial in determining my next steps. So, I’m excited to see what comes.

Why I decided to study web development

Carl Setzer
information sign on shelf

I came to study web development a bit differently than most (more on that journey here). Much of my background has been in some variant of communications. Lots of writing (I’ve loved writing for years…it’s what got me started in blogging), but also photography, newsletter creation/editing/management, web content, public affairs and policy…my list goes on a bit here. Over the years, I started exploring website creation. Mostly just exploring on personal projects. In 2000, I created one for the church I worked at. I then worked specifically in communications roles in a few companies. The past 10 years or so, I’ve focused on digital marketing. This includes pay-per-click, SEO, content marketing, blogging and social media campaigns. Websites have been crucial elements of that. I created and managed several sites, mostly WordPress sites, but several others as well.

I was struggling to choose between web development and graphic design. Web development won since I’ve long seen the web as the future of communications. Now, though, it’s really, well, the “now” of communications. And I really want to grab hold of the now, and what’s coming. With web development, I guess I need to explore Web 3.0.

PHP and WordPress

Carl Setzer
phplogo

This quarter I’m studying PHP at Edmonds College. Many of my classes have a cumulative project that we build towards over the quarter. For this class, we’ll be creating plugins for WordPress. I’m pretty excited as I’ve used WordPress for years and deepening my knowledge will be fantastic. Hopefully, I’ll get enough knowledge to come up with creative ideas.

 

How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, And Ranking

Carl Setzer
Winter quarter is finished! I just turned in my final project (JavaScript) and my brain is oozing onto the floor. Anyway, this quarter I took Intro To JavaScript, Systems Analysis and one I’m calling a catchall, “Joomla and Introduction To SEO”. Interestingly, this last class featured Amazon Web Services (AWS) heavily, and I’ll write about that, too. So, today I’ll explore more of my thoughts on SEO.
  • Crawling and Indexing:
    • Crawling sites is when a robot, for instance Googlebot, explores a webpage. One of the key problems with crawling and crawlers is simply whether they can find your page. There are some ways to push Google in this regard. One valuable way: you can tell Google how you want the page crawled via the Search Console. A related problem: keeping crawlers from indexing pages you don’t want indexed. Things like special landing pages, promo-code pages, pages for A-B testings and so forth. The tool for this is the robots.txt file which directs the bots on how you want the files analyzed.  Web developers also need to consider the crawl budget, which is the average number of pages the Googlebot will before moving onto another site. It is also important to utilize a clean information architecture and sitemaps.
    • Indexes are where search engines store and process the information found while crawling the internet. Just because a site can be crawled does not mean it will be indexed, or indexed the way you want. Robots can be instructed on this within the meta tags.
  • Matching Queries to Content
    • The goal of the search engine: provide the most relevant results to user queries. Their algorithm uses several things to determine that relevance. One of the main ways is backlinks. These links from other sites assert authority on the subject matter. PageRank is part of the Google core algorithm that analyzes link qualities. More natural backlinks are the most valuable. Other elements that Google considers: page clicks, time on the page, the bounce rate (percentage of user visits where they only viewed one page), and pogo-sticking (where the user goes right back to the Search Engine Results Page after visiting the target site. Additionally, for localized content, Google uses these elements to rank results: relevance, distance, and prominence. Things like Google Reviews and Citations are the biggest influencers of prominence.